Ha, great observation! Yes and no :) We've been exceptionally lucky to have several of our close friends help us out with building an MVP (also helps that our

Ha, great observation! Yes and no :) We've been exceptionally lucky to have several of our close friends help us out with building an MVP (also helps that our friends have serious experience!). There's a total of 6 of us - 3 people focusing on infra, frontend and Java connector bits, which allowed myself, Ustin and another dev to put 100% of our attention on backend services + arch. That enabled us to knock this out in a few months. Without the assist, it would probably be closer to your estimate. Something that may be of interest to some folks: we saved a significant amount of time by not having to run our own k8s - we use EKS, it's very nice. Also, MSK - not having to run/manage ZK clusters and kafka nodes is a (costly) privilege haha